23 Nov 2009: " “Going Home for Thanksgiving.” -A Reflection by Carles"

This post is about the singularity. The predictable approach to Thanksgiving would be to critique it from a postcolonialist perspective as voicing the aegis of empire, of rearticulating the hegemony first sought by the invading Europeans in the 15th century and achieved with all-too-forgotten bloodshed, oppression, merciless forced marches along countless trails of tears both metaphoric and literal. Carles is content to allow such a critique to form the deep structure of his investigation of the U.S.'s equinoctial holiday as a psychological rite inculcating governmentality, planting it into the rich soil of postconsumerist, late-capitalist identity. In other words, Carles attempts a postmodern hermaneutics of the self, following the path blazed by seminal French historian and thinker Michel Foucault in his late work on the axiology of the self.

Fittingly, Carles begins with an assault on the Cartesian ego.

I am one of you
I am one of many
I am the only ‘me’ in the world

Subjectivity, in its situatedness in the family is problematized, with the radical positionality of containing multitudes while retaining a discrete atomization of the self foregrounded. The self is at once Other and its self, in an unmediated and unresolved tensional paradox. Lacan's mirror stage is evoked and sublated in a few dozen words as the subjectivization process is opened to a wider scope, a more diverse array of discursive practices.

As Carles notes, foremost of these is the discourse of the brand, adopted as a generative language of self:

Feeling anxious
about my extended family
‘commenting’ on my new personal brand
that that won’t understand

The syntax is obscure here, but in a radical reversal of agency, Carles argues that the brand itself will not comprehend its deployment in the familial context -- an allusion to Deleuze and Guattari's rejection of the Oedipal drama as determinant in the last instance. Anxiety has leapt from the castration complex squarely into the field of exchange -- to the commercialized positioning within a discourse of competing objects. Though the family will attempt to "comment" and interpret the personal brand, the brand itself will transcend such commentary, leaving its mark, as it were on those who sought to master its code. It will objectify those who come into contact with it, reifying a living relation into the frozen gesture of mutual misrecognition (méconnaissance).

Hence Carles is able to posit the identification of unlike subjects as branded object:

New personal Brand
Finding out about new bands
Genuinely connecting with fascinating humans
Who want the same life that I do.

The human and the lifeless thing are converging at a point that suggest cybernetic posthumanity, in which all emotions, all attempts at connection, must have their "genuine" qualities affirmed in the face of impassive skepticism. In the networked world, as Carles suggests here, connection requires no genuineness; it merely requires compatible interfaces, automated protocols of informational exchange, a suitable markup language of the soul. The systems and institutions in which the human cyborg is deployed are no longer distinguishable from one another: "I just want to live inside of a living mishmash of humans/architecture/public transportation." This, Carles implies, is what we have made of our "New World".

The connection to the family then is vestigial, an obstacle to overcome in pursuit of the posthuman destiny:

Afraid to see my family now that it is 100% impossible for them to ‘get’ me
But maybe I need to ‘get’ them
to understand what I don’t want to be

To reject the family, to reject origins, to efface the biological connection in favor of digital "alternative" ones being built out by the ruling technocracy -- these are the sad remnants of old festival rituals that once bound the community, the tribe. Now there is only ritual rejections, a negative dialectics that carves out a space of pure negativity, in which one consists of only that one remembers and discards:

Momentarily I will get ‘caught up’ in the moment
and start to reconnect with zany high school stories
but then will remember
‘That’s not who I am any more. That bro is dead.’

Carles's fable pointedly reveals that what lives on is a rootless, zombified shell with corpses in its mouth.